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Monday, December 31, 2018

With the year ending, I've binged everything I was able to squeeze in, and so now it's time for my Top 12 TV Shows of 2018.

A couple disclaimers: it's Peak TV so I certainly can't see EVERYTHING. I haven't yet gotten to see the new season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, so if you're wondering how it disappeared from this year's list, that's why. One Day at a Time remains unfinished, and there was really no point this year that I felt ready for The Handmaid's Tale, so if any of those obvious omissions bugs you, you now know why.

Onto the countdown!

12) Forever - Upon release, critics were asked not to reveal the concept of this afterlife-set series, an odd prohibition considering this show semi-reinvented itself in each of the first three episodes. Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen play a married couple reunited in the afterlife and find that the malaise that their marriage has become might mean there's a reason the vows say "till death do us part." Not really a comedy or a drama, but something in between, the show had its own unique feel and some solid, lived-in performances from the leads.

11) Homecoming - Julia Roberts comes to TV! Or at least Amazon. At times, this story of a woman helping returning servicemen deal with PTSD got a bit too showy with its storytelling, but this slow-burn thriller deployed its mystery well and built the central relationship between Roberts and Stephen James's veteran even better. At a time when too many streaming shows have one hour or longer episodes that feel even longer, it was a delight to find eight episodes that clocked in at thirty minutes each and never had time to bore.10) Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Most of this year's short 6-episode run were on-par for the show, that is to say, wacky and delightful, but the third episode was the true standout. Done in the style of a true-crime documentary, we get the history of Jon Hamm's Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, and the idea of applying the Making a Murderer motif to this story feels so obvious in retrospect, it's a wonder it wasn't done sooner. I'm gonna miss this show.

9) Counterpart - As I haven't seen season 2, this ranking is based only on season one. Though the shows deliberate pace occasionally felt TOO deliberate, most weeks this was an enthralling Cold War-type story that was an excellent showcase in how subtly J.K. Simmons could distinguish his identical characters without giving one of them a scar, a beard or overt facial tick. The show boasts a two of my favorite tropes - actors convincingly playing dual roles and actors showing off how they can have Character A play their identical Character B and get it JUST wrong enough that it reads as one character imitating another. Simmons's work aside, another notable episode is episode 7, which agonizingly reveals the history of how one character from the other side came to murder and replace their double on our side.

8) Brooklyn Nine-Nine - In its sixth season, the show finally got around to the HOMICIDE in-joke we were all waiting for and put Andre Braugher in an episode-long interrogation. Even better, the perp was THIS IS US's Sterling K. Brown. It was a highlight of a generally strong season. Cancelled by Fox, the show got a reprieve less than 24 hours later from NBC, where it will hopefully reign for many years to come. I want more teasers like this:

7) DC's Legends of Tomorrow - The most off-beat of the CW superhero shows really hit its stride this year. There's not a single drama on TV less afraid to be goofy and that kind of swing for the fences mentality ends up hitting a lot more than it misses. Where else can you have a time-traveling talking gorilla try to kill Barak Obama in college? Or how about when our heroes realize the disembodied voice of their demon enemy sounds like John Noble, so they hatch a plan to go back in time to the set of Lord of the Rings and, disguised as PAs, get John Noble to record dialogue that will let them manipulate their foes? By the way, both of these crazy developments happen in the SAME episode6) The Haunting of Hill House - a completely unsettling experience elevated even further by a couple standout hours. On every level - casting, directing, performing, production design - this show hit the mark and then some. The resemblance between the child actors and their adult counterparts was uncanny, to say nothing of the siblings' resemblance to each other. The series most intense hour revealed the truth of the "Bent-Neck Woman" and followed that with a stunning episode full of long-takes that managed to tell the story more than drawing unnecessary attention to each other. (Pay attention, HOMECOMING.) This is one I can't wait to revisit in a few months.

5) Barry - A dark comedy that wasn't afraid to get REALLY dark. Just when it started to feel like the bread and butter of the show was making fun of vapid acting classes and the people who frequent them, the series took a hard right with a violent subplot that culminated in one of the best scenes of the year - Barry showing us that no matter how much we'd laughed at his acting dream, there was still a ruthless killer lurking in there. Bill Hader gave one of the best performances of the year, perfectly balanced by Henry Winkler's acting coach. I can't wait to see how season two moves forward.

4) Dear White People - a nuanced look at racial issues through the experiences of the black population at an Ivy League college. I was late in getting to the show, but once I started, I binged through both seasons in less than a week and a half. Even when the characters are directly confronting racism and cultural tension, it never feels preachy. That's a credit to the deeply-drawn and richly portrayed characters. The show can do an episode that's essentially just two characters in a room debating their perspectives on race and all of it comes from character.

3) Better Call Saul - Hands down, the show's best season so far finally gave Rhea Seehorn's Kim a lot of material to sink her teeth into while Bob Odenkirk took Jimmy close to the final transformation into Saul Goodman. In a season that got much closer to completing the bridge to BREAKING BAD, it ironically felt even more capable of standing on its own.

2) American Vandal - Season two was less outright funny than season one, but proved even more adept than it's predecessor at mining the loneliness and challenges of teenage life for story material. VANDAL again proves to be one of the most thoughtful depictions of high school and the different faces modern teens wear in order to survive in it. Who would have thought a mockumentary about the hunt for a laxative-spiking prankster called the Turd Burglar would have so much complexity to it?

1) The Good Place - Until the show's most recent episode a few weeks ago, THE GOOD PLACE was sitting at #3 on this list. Then came the story that required D'Arcy Carden to play all four major characters, sometimes without even the aid of different clothes and styling to distinguish among the characters. It was an Emmy-worthy episode and one that hopefully won't be forgotten more than half a year from now.

Beyond that, no show on TV is more fearless about reinventing itself. Every season has seen a massive change in the status quo and usually even that status quo gets blown up by midseason. Every season feels like it should be the show's last, and yet the writers keep finding ingenious ways of exploring these characters and the inner workings of the afterlife. I want this show to go on forever, so long as it keeps up the work of not overstaying its welcome. There is no show I look forward to more each week.

Monday, December 24, 2018

(Note: this post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after using one of my links.)
If you've read my MasterClass reviews over the last couple years, but have been waiting for the right opportunity to buy, you might be interested in this Christmas deal. MasterClass is doing a "Buy One, Gift One" sale. The promotion allows a new customer to purchase an All-Access Pass for $180 and receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge.

Also if a customer has already purchased a single class for $90, they can upgrade to the All-Access Pass for an additional $90 and still receive another All-Access Pass to give as a gift.

Each class runs about 5-6 hours and comes with a workbook and often valuable supplementary materials. For instance, if you take Shonda Rhimes's class, you get the series bible for Grey's Anatomy, the original 10-page pitch document for the series, and the pilot scripts for both Grey's and Scandal.

As I've said in my reviews, I consider the Ron Howard class on directing to be essential for anyone who wants to be a film director. I absolutely will guarantee its value. If there's someone in your life who might find this of value, definitely consider gifting them the All-Access Pass. To help you out, I've included links below to the reviews I've written for the writing and filmmaking-related classes, as well as links to the full roster if that helps convince you that this purchase will be worthwhile for your interests.

And best of all, if you use any of these links, I get a commission, so it's like giving a gift to a friend or family member AND me!

Again, you can purchase that All-Access Pass and get a free one to gift here. The sale lasts through December 26th!

Monday, December 17, 2018

(Note: this post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after using one of my links.)
About three and a half years ago, I reviewed Dustin Hoffman's MasterClass in Acting. It was my first experience with MasterClass, and one that was extremely positive. Though I have little interest in being an actor, watching how he guided other actors ended up being it's own kind of master class in directing a performance. There's a lot I took from that class that I expect I'll apply in my own directing.

That class is no longer available, owing to Hoffman having some bad behavior exposed in the wake of #MeToo. I've been meaning for a while to review another acting class, and as my one year All-Access Pass approached expiration, I decided to take in Samuel L. Jackson's teaches Acting.

Jackson's class is different enough that you don't feel like you're getting the same kind of experience if you happened to have seen Hoffman's when it was available. If you put a gun to my head, I'd probably say I prefer Hoffman's because he tends to get a little deeper in the segments where he's working with acting students. There's a tradeoff, though. Jackson has six students in his class segments, which he divides into rotating pairings of two.

Since it's a Samuel L. Jackson class, it's not a surprise that Jackson chose scenes from his movies. (This is another contrast with Hoffman, who used other films he had no connection to.) This EASILY can be an acting trap because Jackson is such an iconic performer that even if you're not playing an iconic SCENE, it's easy to fall into imitating Jackson's energy and rhythms. One of the scenes is an iconic Jackson moment - the climax of Pulp Fiction. The students tackle this with varying degrees of success, and it has to be nerve-wracking to play such a scene in front of the guy who earned several acting nominations for it. Jackson challenges the students to explain what the scene is about - particularly the meaning of the Bible quote that Jules recites near the end.

The people who understand the meaning of that quote and are able to bring a little of themselves to the role rather than just imitating Jackson tend to give the stronger performances. Subsequently we see the same students perform scenes from The Negotiator and Kingsman: The Secret Service, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the students who found their own way into the Pulp Fiction diner scene also tend to be the stronger performers in the other scene. We're not given the students' names (unless I missed them in the credits), but the young red-headed woman gives a very strong Jules performance that serves the scene and feels wholly unique from Jackson's own interpretation.

Jackson gives notes, but his direction is often less specific than Hoffman's was. He's good at identifying what's not working in a scene and offering advice about how he would build a character, but he seems more inclined to work with what he's presented rather than give a direction that completely alters that actors performance. That said, just seeing six different interpretations of a scene is kind of its own acting lesson and it doesn't take long before the viewer is coming up with their own performance notes. As good as Jackson is, it's the diversity of students that really makes this segment work. Seeing their process makes this more than just Jackson saying "Here's how I build a character."

I like a lot of the straight talk Jackson has for his students. He says, "Don't say to [producers and directors at an audition,] 'I don't think my character would do that,' because they're right. Your character won't be doing that because you won't be getting that job." He advises actors to try and take a direction even if they think it's wrong, encouraging them to think about all the ways a scene could be done ahead of time. Then they're in a better position to take that direction and incorporate it into what they've already done.

He also tells them "You take every chance you get to act" because you never know when someone will see you and feel that you're right for something else they're working on. "Nobody can teach you how to get your break," he says, but "if you ain't prepared when opportunity knocks, who knows when he's gonna be coming back that way." Later he talks about how his wife would ask why he had taken an audition for a couple small roles. His answer was "I think that writer's talented, and I think that director's gonna direct another movie and even if I don't get this job, they're gonna remember my black ass when I leave out of there. They're gonna know 'I know exactly who I need to hire for this next movie.'"

There's a lot of practical straight talk of that nature, sort of a working actor's school of hard knocks. Since Jackson has walked the walk throughout his career. He tells a story about being offered the role of Jules in Pulp Fiction, then finding out that another actor blew the filmmakers away and was on the verge of getting that role. This forced Jackson into an acting competition where he showed up to play ALL of Jules's scenes for the producers, which meant he had just days to do all the work of building a character that he normally would spend weeks on. This story takes some interesting detours but the end result is that he blows them away with his performance and finds out later that they fully intended to give the other actor the part until that acting session.

He also discusses how working on A Time to Kill gave him a lesson in how editing can change the intent of a performance. He saw his role of Carl Lee Haley as that of a father who wanted his daughter to know that he would always protect her, and when he murdered the two men who raped and beat her, it wasn't an act of vengeance but an act of love - making sure they wouldn't hurt her again. But he felt that every scene that spoke to that motivation got cut out of the film and that what was left gave the impression of his character as a "conniving Negro" (his words) who was playing the system to beat a murder charge. It gave him the lesson that no matter how much work he put into his performance, there were always factors that could alter its intent.

Other lectures delve into how Jackson builds his characters. I may never look at his hairstyles the same way again now that I know the impact that a Lawrence Oliver retrospective had on him. He noticed that Oliver looked different in every role and that inspired Jackson to think more about his look - and specifically his hair - when he approached a role.

It's not all about the external of a character, by the way. There's a lot of thoughtful advice about creating a backstory and biography beyond what's on the page. By way of example, he even contrasts two of his roles that are superficially similar, but markedly different.

Overall, it's a solid MasterClass. Jackson is engaging and leads an effective class that carries his strong point of view. There are times if I considered that might be a drawback, if there's too narrow a focus on "what works for Samuel L. Jackson," but really, people aren't paying for Acting 101 - they're paying for Jackson's experience.

I don't know if I'll have an opportunity to compare it to Helen Mirren's acting class, but from talking to some of my actor friends, most of them would be satisfied with what Jackson delivers here. For non-actors, I don't know if this is quite the resource on directing actors that Hoffman's class was, but it remains a solid window into the other side of the creative process.

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA is quite possibly the darkest show I've ever seen. I was a few weeks behind in completing this series and so while I was still mid-binge, I did my best to shut out the noise from pop culture sites that drop 13 recaps and even more thinkpieces within four days of the release of a Netflix show. I'm used to this by now and have developed my own method of getting through a new Netflix drop - no more than two episodes a night, and if two new shows drop close to each other, I tend to alternate back and forth. I like this method because it forces me to appreciate each ep on its own more.

The detriment is that during the instances where a binge takes a couple weeks, by the time I'm ready to talk about a show, the rest of the internet has moved on. There are a lot of reasons to appreciate the binge model, but I miss experiencing television at the same time as every other viewer. It made for more interesting conversation. Hell, it made for a longer, more in-depth conversation. That ship has long sailed, but usually, even if I was avoiding the thinkpieces, I at least had a vague awareness of their existence. With SABRINA, I finished the show with very little sense of what the wider discussion surrounding it was.

And with SABRINA, the most vocal protests I've seen have come from... the Satanic Church unhappy with their depiction? Really?

I'm not a fan of protesting TV scripted shows or campaigning for cancellations. If we're talking about people like Tucker Carlson who are putting genuinely harmful and dangerous ideas out there under the guise of "news," yes, by all means protest his sponsors and get his white supremacist ass off television. With scripted TV, the worst material has a habit of failing all on its own. Don't watch and it'll probably go away. Remember back when everyone thought STALKER was brutal and violent? Have you even thought about STALKER since that controversy?

The SABRINA situation shocks me mostly because of the total lack of reaction. Like many of my generations, I rolled my eyes when religious groups attacked Harry Potter for promoting Satanism, and every now and then you'd hear about fringe religious nutcases complaining that BUFFY's depiction of the occult was equally demonic. Both claims are pretty baseless to anyone who's actually consumed the material, but SABRINA isn't playing the witchcraft the same way - it's EXPLICITLY Satanic. The main arc of the first season deals with the fact that once she turns 16, the half-human, half-witch Sabrina must embrace her witch side and undergo a dark baptism where she pledges her obedience (and her virginity) to Satan himself.

Yep, there's no hiding behind fictional* demonic entities here. This is literally the Devil and our heroine as grown up as part of a coven that worships him. Sabrina as a few human friends but the most vivid personalities of the show are ALL IN on this Devil-worshipping.

*I consider myself pretty agnostic, so to be honest ALL of this stuff is fictional to me. New Testament, Crisis on Infinite Earths... it's all pretty much the same to me. But as the Devil is "real" to a large segment of the audience, I'm going with the flow for the sake of this piece. For me, the Devil is about as scary as Thanos.

Has there ever been a show where the "Good Guys" worry that the consequence of a teenage girl not selling herself to Satan will mean bad things for them? Sabrina's aunts Zelda and Hilda are depicted more sympathetically than some of the rest of the coven and spend half the season urging Sabrina to go through with her pact with the Devil. Using ACTUAL Satan as a player on the show should make the morality as black and white as possible, but the show seems to want us to perceive some shades of grey via the aunts' dilemma.

Pretend this was a grounded drama and instead of Literal Satan, Sabrina was being urged to give herself to the satanic Cult Leader. There's no ambiguity there, right? It's an evil act and any characters advocating for it must be evil. SABRINA takes that dynamic and makes it the drive of the aunts whom Sabrina loves dearly. It's an incredible subversion to anyone who remembers those characters on the Melissa Joan Hart series.

A late-season episode revolves around "The Feast of Feasts," where one member of the Coven is selected to be the Queen of the Feast. It's an honor that demands the selected Queen slit her own throat so that the coven may feast on her body. Sabrina finds the whole practice barbaric and is prepared to protest it, but the selected Queen, Prudence, is only too proud to be a part of this legacy. Through most of the episode, we're pretty sure we know where this is headed. Sabrina will take a Lisa Simpson-like stand against this archaic practice, people will begin to question this tradition (especially since we're told it's an old tradition being revived after a long dormancy), and in the end, humanity prevails - probably after a stirring speech from our heroine.

And for a while it looks like exactly what we'll get. The lottery is found to have been tainted, rigged. Sabrina makes an appeal that their leader simply outlaw the Feast, thereby facilitating a cover-up of this scandal. It's a situation where everyone saves face and Sabrina gets a "win," so it surely has to work, right?

Before they can put it into action at a meeting of a coven, one of the witches slits her own throat in genuinely disturbing fashion. Moments later, the entire coven goes ravenous, feeding on her as Sabrina can only watch with revulsion.

Like I said, DARK.

Then, the show somehow tops this bleakness with a finale where Sabrina is convinced that the only way she can get the power to save her friends and her entire town is to pledge herself to Satan of her own free will. She must sign her soul over to the Dark Lord and pledge to answer him when he calls. Sabrina does so and though she saves the town, it comes at a cost. By the end of the episode, she's strutting around with bleached blonde hair dressed like some of the more evil members of the coven who've spent the season representing everything Sabrina rejects.

It's as chilling an ending as seeing Captain Picard assimilated as one of the Borg. It's darker still because it's a selling of the soul that's stripped of all metaphor. She literally gave herself over to the Devil. There are altruistic motivations for doing so, but the result is that we're left with a Sabrina who's an agent of darkness.

Walter White: "I'm going to spend five years metaphorically selling my soul to the Devil for wealth and power."

Sabrina Spellman: "Lol, that's cute."

Last season I was shocked that Archie Comics was so willing to let RIVERDALE have Archie and Veronica get in deep with the mob. This makes that look like child's play. Without even debating whether it's good or bad on a story level that Sabrina sells her soul, it is straight-up the bleakest thing I've ever seen a series do, let alone one aimed at a teen audience.

While I'm on the subject of Dark TV, when I first tweeted some of these thoughts, it was clear that several of my readers immediately assumed that I was drawing a link between darkness and quality. I said the show was the darkest show I've ever seen - without any reference to its quality. From the replies I got, it was evident some respondents took it as an endorsement. I don't think saying something is "dark" automatically makes it good... nor do I think that alone makes something bad. In the end, it all comes down to story.

(Good example: in 13 REASONS WHY, I think Hannah's rape and her subsequent suicide in season one are also two of the darkest scenes I've seen on TV because there's emotional context to them. Contrast that with the bathroom sexual assault at the end of season 2, which is equally brutal, but creatively indefensible in a lot of ways.)

Time will tell if SABRINA can become a great show. It's willing to go places that few other shows have gone before, which shows bravery. As Sabrina explores the darkness next season, it will be discipline in story-telling that ultimately will determine how good a show it can become.

And still I wonder, what has exempted SABRINA from the typical moral panic that most other shows of its kind have faced? I don't think it's flying under the radar, so what makes that story of Satanism acceptable, while "fat-shaming" and suicide are extremely taboo?

Friday, November 23, 2018

(Note: this post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after using one of my links.)
If you've read my MasterClass reviews over the last couple years, but have been waiting for the right opportunity to buy, you might be interested in this Black Friday deal. MasterClass is doing a "Buy One, Gift One" sale. The promotion allows a new customer to purchase an All-Access Pass for $180 and receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge.

Also if a customer has already purchased a single class for $90, they can upgrade to the All-Access Pass for an additional $90 and still receive another All-Access Pass to give as a gift.

Each class runs about 5-6 hours and comes with a workbook and often valuable supplementary materials. For instance, if you take Shonda Rhimes's class, you get the series bible for Grey's Anatomy, the original 10-page pitch document for the series, and the pilot scripts for both Grey's and Scandal.

As I've said in my reviews, I consider the Ron Howard class on directing to be essential for anyone who wants to be a film director. I absolutely will guarantee its value. If there's someone in your life who might find this of value, definitely consider gifting them the All-Access Pass. To help you out, I've included links below to the reviews I've written for the writing and filmmaking-related classes, as well as links to the full roster if that helps convince you that this purchase will be worthwhile for your interests.

And best of all, if you use any of these links, I get a commission, so it's like giving a gift to a friend or family member AND me!

Again, you can purchase that All-Access Pass and get a free one to gift here.

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

As much as movie-going is supposed to be something of a shared experience, with a couple hundred people engaging with the same program at the same time, I've lately come to think that television is the true communal bonding experience while watching content. This is more anecdotal than scientific, but when I've discussed both movies and TV shows with people, it's more common to find their emotional bond is stronger to the TV experience than the film.

So because I enjoy turning my Twitter mentions into a mess for 24 hours at a time, last Monday I asked Twitter which pre-Twitter TV episodes or events would they have liked to have seen live-tweet reactions to the first time they aired. I figured it was a fun way to poll people on which TV moments made them lose their minds.

TV episode/event from the pre-Twitter era that you'd love to have seen live-tweet reactions to the first time it aired?

I can think of a dozen examples, but for this I'll go with: Carter and Lucy get stabbed on ER.

My personal pick was the end of the ER episode "Be Still My Heart," where Carter and Lucy are stabbed and left bleeding out in Curtain Area 3 while the rest of the staff parties outside, oblivious to their distress. It was a helluva cliffhanger for the following week. I was on Usenet when it first aired and I remember the ER newsgroup going nuts. This also kicked off a tradition of new members constantly asking "What was the song that played when Carter and Lucy got stabbed?" ("Battleflag.")

A lot of people responded that my moment would have been their pick too, recalling their own shock at the twist. There was a fair amount of appreciation for ER in general in the replies as many people also cited George Clooney's surprise cameo in Juliana Margulis's farewell episode, the moment where ER docs realize the patient hit by a train who they're trying to save is actually Omar Epps's character, med student Gant, Mark Greene's death, and the episode where Mark loses the pregnant woman.

Apparently I have a lot of ER fans who follow me. The fact that at its peak, the show was pulling in 30 million viewers a week might have something to do with it. Let me put this in perspective - last year's number one show was THE BIG BANG THEORY and it had just under 19 million viewers. Your average episode of NCIS pulls in 12 million viewers, and last season, THIS IS US averaged just over 11 million viewers.

Let's let that sink in, the "it drama" on TV has an audience of about 1/3 of ER's reach.

Some other frequently mentioned responses:
- Col. Blake's death on M*A*S*H
- the M*A*S*H finale
- Captain Picard assimilated by the Borg in the Season 3 cliffhanger
- Who Shot J.R?
- Who Shot Mr. Burns
- Seinfeld's "The Contest," which many people confoundingly remembered as "The Bet." Was this some kind of Mandela Effect?
- Lots of X-Files, particularly Scully's abduction, Mulder's abduction and Scully's pregnancy.
- Lots of Friends, especially Ross saying Rachel's name when he was marrying Emily and the finale.
- Will's breakdown over his father on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
- Alias's "Phase One," the Super Bowl episode that completely blew up the show. Sidney realizing she was missing two years was another frequent mention.
- Many Lost moments
- Dwayne crashing Whitley's wedding on A Different World.
- Joey/Pacey on Dawson's Creek.
- Melrose Place. Wig.
- Multiple Buffy and Angel moments, particularly Angel losing his soul and Buffy having to kill him. Her death and the musical were also brought up a lot.

Look at the shows mentioned there. With a few exceptions, those were Top 10 shows at a time when TV was pulling in a much larger audience. The result was that those big "WTF" moments were penetrating into the larger culture in a way that today's fractured viewing could never hope to achieve. Can you think of a single cliffhanger over the last couple years that had audiences as much on edge as "Who shot JR?" or the fate of the Enterprise against Locutus of Borg.

There was a fun sense of community in the replies. Someone would mention their dorm freaking out as Kimberly ripped off her wig to reveal a scar on MELROSE PLACE, prompting others to share their memories of watching the show live. They talked about how old they were, who they were with, who they had to talk to about it afterwards. It was a neat window into how so many of us had a shared point of reference, and then seeing how those experiences were the same or different from each other.

I tried to think about my biggest WTF television moments of the year and I honestly couldn't come up with anything that made any kind of comparable cultural impact. Three moments this season that genuinely stunned me were:

- From BARRY - the moment when Barry realizes his friend, his old army buddy, isn't going to be able to keep quite about their involvement in the deaths of some mobsters.

- From CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA - the outcome of "The Feast of Feasts," and I really feel like that's all I should say about it.

- From THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE - the ending of "The Bent-Neck Lady," where the true behind one of the hauntings snaps into grim, heart-breaking focus.

Of the three, the only one I felt any real community discussion about was THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, and even that was pretty sparse compared to what any of the above examples generated. There are two main reasons for this - one is the aforementioned drop in viewership. The other factor is that the streaming model means that we're no longer all experiencing content at the same time.

In 2000, if you wanted to watch ER, then chances are you had your ass in front of the TV at 10pm Thursday night. When you went into work or school the next day, everyone had seen it. It was fresh on their minds and the shared "Holy shit! Did you see that?" was a real thing. We don't have that any more. Even if you're watching network TV when it airs, there's a good chance some people around you are waiting to binge it, or are at least time-shifting via DVRs.

That aspect is becoming obsolete and it makes me sad we might be at the tail end of an era when there was such a strong shared experience. There's no show on TV that will have quite as large an impact as an ER, or a SEINFELD. In fifteen years, if someone drops a reference to BARRY on Twitter, there's no way it can elicit the same kind of knowing responses that the 500 "I, Ross, take thee, Rachel..." replies I got did.

That doesn't mean that television can't touch the individual in a personal way. I think in the last two or three years I've seen several shows that hit me emotionally and personally as much as anything I watched in the era of ER. The fragmenting of the audience means that as shows become more unique and specific, they are less broadly targeted. They appeal to niche tastes, which is how you end up with a show like AMERICAN VANDAL, that's as funny as THE SIMPSONS in its peak, but seen by a tiny pie slice of that audience.

Fifteen years from now, if someone were to ask the same question I did about shocking TV moments, how likely would the answer come back as "Who drew the dicks?" or "Who is the Turd Burgler?" The mega-hit TV show is gone and with it is our shared fury at moments like Ross insisting he and Rachel were on a break, our shared shock when Captain Picard became a Borg, our shared delight in seeing Mulder and Scully kiss.

The cultural touchstones are getting less broad, and until I got a day long demonstration of how so many people's formative TV passions overlapped, I don't think I appreciated what we're in the process of losing.

Monday, November 5, 2018

(Note: this post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after using one of my links.)
I wasn't sure what I'd be getting when I started Steve Martin's Masterclass "Steve Martin Teaches Comedy." There's Steve the Comedian, who also appears as Steve the Host and Steve the Talk Show Guest - the guy whose comic persona often plays as sincere insincerity. Would his course work be expressed via irony laden monologues and dry anecdotes?

Or would it be Steve Martin the Serious Artist, who once upset an audience that came to a public interview about his novel because he was discussing the art world (the subject of said novel) and not telling jokes or talking about his career. The audience was apparently so bored that they demanded - and got - refunds.

I saw Mr. Steve Martin's play BRIGHT STAR when it was in previews in San Diego a few years ago, and it too was a largely serious script, the tension broken only intermittently with one-liners that carried Martin's familiar voice. Between that and having read a few of his books, I knew that he didn't always write in the comic voice for which he was best known. I had a brief thought that peeking behind the curtain of Steve's carefully crafted comic voice might be a bit like dissecting a frog - impossible to do without killing it.

With that risk and possibility of total boredom awaiting me, I started the class.

I loved it. This is Steve Martin at his most charming. Not once did I feel him talking down to his audience and it's clear he had put an immense amount of thought into what he was saying. If Mamet was the erudite professor who loved to hear himself talk and Apatow was the shoot-from-the-hip guy who tells you informally how it is, Martin is the platonic ideal in-between them. He's laser-focused and gets right to the heart of every topic. That efficiency means he makes his point effectively and is able to move on to a broader variety of topics.

You might have noticed the class is called "Steve Martin Teaches Comedy," Not "Steve Martin Teaches Stand-Up Comedy," "Steve Martin Teaches Comedy Screenwriting," or "Steve Martin Teaches Comedy Performance." That's because Mr. Steve Martin doesn't limit his focus to just one of those topics, but encompasses many forms of comedy, including the three I cited.

From the beginning, Steve lays out his philosophy, telling people in the introduction that he doesn't believe people need to have a particular gift to be funny. In fact, he later says, "I had no talent," when he was starting out. He believes he became funny through the hard work of learning what was funny, learning how one particular construction of words could elicit a laugh while a similar but different configuration was less effective.

Several of the early lessons focus on gathering material, discovering one's comedic voice and how they express themselves. He talks about building a comic persona and dovetails into how stand-up comedy writing should be more than just set-up/punchline.

One thing that really stood out to me was how he distinguished himself from his contemporaries. Steve began in stand-up in the 70s, in a very political time. There were hundreds of comedians doing political humor, so he went non-political at a very political time. "Rather than be at the tail end of an old movement, I was at the front end of the new movement," he says. Going that way defined his comic persona and helped him hone the kinds of jokes that fit that. A comedian's best jokes can only be delivered by that person, he seems to believe, and he demonstrates this when he asks the audience to imagine signature bits delivered by different iconic comedians.

And it seems obvious when pointed out, but how often do you find yourself thinking about comedy that way? This led me to imagine Rodney Dangerfield delivering a George Carlin monologue. It probably wouldn't have worked and once you start thinking about the reasons why, everything Steve says makes sense. It's not even that Steve uses the Masterclass to tell you how to be Steve Martin. He tells you the mechanics behind how Steve Martin was built and does it in a way that lets you apply that process to you.

There's a lot of great, practical advice in how you perform for the stage. Considering Steve is a master of timing, it was incredibly valuable to hear him deconstruct the rhythm of a bit and then show us a clip of that bit in action.

Here's a good example of how Steve's precision made me think about something that never would have crossed my mind. One of his pet peeves is a comedian who starts the act with "How are we all doing tonight?" Steve says, "You've blown one of the most important moments of your show, which is 'It's beginning and who are you and how you define yourself.' Second, you've asked the audience to participate... which is almost the worst thing that can happen unless you're highly skilled in dealing with that."

He then runs a clip of his early standup act. Steve takes to the stage with a banjo as the audience applauds. He milks the applause as if he's embarrassed by it, playing it over the top so that we get, "ah, it's a bit pompous." He playfully flips the audience the bird, says "Thank you! I'll take that." Then after quickly fiddling with a water bottle (I assume in parody of how other comedians would), he says, "We're gonna start the show in just a few minutes... just waiting for the drugs to kick in." And you go, "Ah! THAT is Steve Martin."

There are a couple lessons that deal with writing screenplays and developing characters, and I would say that Martin's thoughts are at least as insightful and useful as those given by Sorkin, Rhimes and Mamet in other classes I've taken. (They go into greater depth, but the lessons certainly compliment each other.) There are even a few digressions into comedy acting for the screen, with one example being a FATHER OF THE BRIDE scene where Steve barely does anything, but because of how he played that, the audience imposed so much emotion and humor onto his blank slate.

I think these MasterClasses work best when the instructor is given some students to play off of and react to. Steve is given four comedy writers, some who have written stand-up pieces and some who have written sketches. He reads some of their pieces and as he does, suggest changes that always improve the act. For example, he'll note that a joke premise is promising, but is laser-focused when a later joke seems to slightly shift subjects in a way that confuses the audience. He's able to identify parts that are funny, but aren't helping the shape of the larger joke. It's like watching a master editor say "Cut this, move this up here. Change this word. Stop this joke here" and somehow it improves remarkably.

Notably, Steve does this in a way that's encouraging and always leaves the writer feeling good about the changes. They can tell he's made the joke better and done so in a way that as he continues through the act, you start hearing the jokes the way he does. He's quietly effective at not just pointing out what's wrong, but in teaching you how to make it right.

At this point, I have yet to encounter a truly bad MasterClass. They're all being judged against each other. Ron Howard's directing class remains for me the gold standard of what MasterClass should be, at least if you have any interest in directing.

If you're strictly about writing, Aaron Sorkin and Shonda Rhimes classes are both more in depth about TV writing specifically, but by their very nature, they're not too helpful when it comes to crafting comedy. Judd Apatow's course deals with comedy from a writing/directing standpoint, but I'd give Martin the edge over him simply because Martin covers performing and seeing him react to other students and writing he's not responsible for allows him to show how you can apply his expertise outside the control group of his own work.

Is it worth $90? I've justified the math for the other classes and this is on par with several of the better courses. For my money, the real value is in the All-Access Pass. For $180/year, or the cost of just two courses, you get access to ALL the courses. At that point, you can really amortize your investment. Doing six classes in a year brings that down to $30/class - not too shabby at all.

If you want my take, Ron Howard's directing class is essential and you can compliment it with any of the other writing classes, using my reviews as a guide towards what would appeal to you.

Monday, October 22, 2018

A fun feature of the mockumentary genre is that we're often watching a reality that has been specifically shaped and crafted by one of the player in that reality. From Marty Di Burgi in THIS IS SPINAL TAP to Taylor Gentry in BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON, most mockumentaries can't resist showing us the person behind the camera. In the cases of those two films and many like it, the result is to portray an interloper in the world they're exploring. It provides someone who can react to the eccentricity of the subjects of the documentary.

But this also means that every thing we see on screen was left in purposefully by the observer we often see on screen. That means a smart mockumentary filmmaker will be constantly asking themselves, "What is the director saying by choosing to show this? What's their agenda? What does this choice reveal about them?"

The trick is that when we're watching a "finished" mockumentary, we don't know what the ostensible director chose to leave out. A problem child getting a "villain edit" could be a total asshole in "real" life, or he could just be the victim of a hatchet job. It's hard for the viewer to perceive the intent unless the hatchet job gets heavy-handed enough that the film communicates "this director has a bias."

This possibility is one of the things that fascinates me the most about mockumentaries. Surely there are a number of examples in the genre where the filmmakers don't want us to be aware of the invisible hands behind the camera. (Many Christopher Guest films fall under this classification.) But when done right, it can add an extra layer of depth.

The first season of AMERICAN VANDAL didn't forget about this. Presented as a student-produced documentary, the show followed two filmmakers efforts to determine who was responsible for a vulgar act of vandalism. In presenting and discarding suspects, filmmaker Peter Maldonado often disseminated or verified embarrassing rumors and dug into personal lives of his classmates to an embarrassing degree.

One revealing moment came in episode 4 of season one when Peter and his collaborator Sam conceded that they both fit the profile of the perpetrator. As they had done a deep dive on the pros and cons of other suspects, Peter and Sam each produced a segment on the other. Sam blows it off as a joke, producing a segment with voiceover that goes, "Could Peter Maldonado have done the dicks?
He's never done anything else wrong
in his life.
He had perfect attendance last year.
He's a total puss.
So, could he have drawn the dicks?
No, no, no, he couldn't have, no.
Again, no."

Peter, on the other hand, takes the gloves off, brutally outing Sam's crush on his friend Gabi and suggesting that Sam might have done the prank out of jealousy, hoping to get prom canceled because he didn't want Gabi to go with Brandon Galloway. Peter doesn't pull any punches in using embarrassing evidence of Sam's crush, either. At one point he shows Sam took 32 selfies before he found the perfect casual one to send to Gabi. It would be a savage embarrassment for Peter to do this segment on any classmate, but that he does it to a best friend AND keeps it in the documentary after Sam gets pissed about it... well, it kinda shows us who Peter is, doesn't it?

Peter is equally insensitive when debunking another theory that centers on Sarah Pearson's hookup list. While initially it seems like it might be part of a chain of evidence that exonerates Dylan Maxwell, it's soon revealed as a dead-end red herring. Peter could have told his story without putting Sarah and others "on blast." In the final episode of the season, Sarah actually confronts Peter about it, telling him, "Your documentary fucked
with people's lives... What did my hookup list have to do with the truth? It didn't prove anything. It had nothing to do with Dylan. It was just humiliating. My dad saw it, Peter."

Here's what's interesting - Peter leaves that confrontation in. It's a moment where he comes off terribly, but he doesn't try to hide it. You might think that means he's learned his lesson. Maybe he even felt he deserved it. Either way, you would hope that such a call-out would merit self-reflection.

And then season 2 of AMERICAN VANDAL shows Peter to be just as callous a dick as before. Again, when examining suspects and their motives, Peter goes for the jugular. One student recently suffered severe embarrassment when photos of him wearing a diaper and baby bonnet were leaked online. This plot point turns out to be somewhat important to the resolution, but Peter probably had ways of addressing it without re-humiliating the poor student. Instead, Peter goes for the shock value, probably showing more than is necessary and delivering this humiliation to a much wider audience than just the teen's classmates.

That's something else to consider. As seriously as Peter took his duty as a filmmaker in season one, at the time he had no reason to think it would ever be seen by anyone outside of his school. There's a very thin defense he could mount that no one beyond those depicted in the documentary would ever care to watch it. But after AMERICAN VANDAL became a viral hit, season 2 informs us that the first season was a Netflix sensation before Peter even started work on his follow-up.

So he knew there was anticipation for the next run of the series. He knew there was a wider global audience that would see this, and he put it all in without a second thought.

Peter learned nothing. And I love that the show committed to that. It makes us reevaluate his decision to keep in his callout from Sara Pearson. Did he think it made him look like the victim? Did he put it in to use as a shield against attacks that he manipulated the editing? Does it help him feel honest and objective if his own documentary calls him out, and is doing that an even greater act of manipulation on his part?

Peter produces compelling documentaries, but a subtext running through them is that he doesn't really connect to people. He sees himself in the mold of an investigative reporter or documentarian, with everyone else just being a player in the drama that unfolds, collateral damage by their very nature. In pursuit of the truth, he'll punish anyone who presents a threatening counternarrative. (Think of how relentlessly Alex Trimboli is shredded by the documentary in season one.)

This is perhaps too meta, but I feel like the next season needs to put Peter's ethics on trial somehow. The groundwork has been laid over two seasons, and while he's gotten pushback, it's been fairly timid (at least, Peter has portrayed it as such.) In the world of the show, Peter has two popular documentaries out there. That's more than enough time for some serious consequences to result from one of them.

Peter Maldonado has shown us who he is, and AMERICAN VANDAL has shown us they know who he is. It's a grenade just waiting to be armed and I am HERE for it.

Monday, October 15, 2018

"Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own. The beautiful ones. The popular ones. The guys that pick on you. Everyone. If you could hear what they were feeling. The loneliness. The confusion. It looks quiet down there. It’s not. It’s deafening."

That was the thesis statement of the season 3 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer entitled "Earshot." Last month, this episode turned 19 years old and yet in many respects it still remains one of the most accurate commentaries on the high school experience. The episode itself has an interesting history. It was originally slated to run on April 27, 1999, but seven days earlier, two teenagers killed 12 of their classmates and two teachers in a massacre at Columbine High School. Suddenly The WB was very nervous that the next episode of Buffy featured Buffy sensing one of her classmates was planning to kill everyone and racing against time to stop a mass casualty event at school.

The fact that the character remarked directly on the rise of school shootings and Oz quipped, "It's bordering on trendy at this point" might have also played a part in the network decision to hold the new episode until just before the start of Season 4.

Buffy as a series got a lot of mileage out of its conceit that "High school is hell." For the first three years, most of the random demon-of-the-week stories were metaphors for typical teenage drama. One of the more effective examples was when Buffy lost her virginity to Angel and the moment of "perfect happiness" broke the curse that forced a soul on the vampire. The result was an unleashed Angelus, ready to do evil and eager to break Buffy's heart and mess with her head. Joss Whedon is often quoted as saying that female viewers would tell him, "The same thing happened to me." They related to the core analogy which was, "I slept with him and he got mean."

Given that kind of identification with teenage pain was central to the show's appeal, it's odd how few shows have run with that ball in the decade and a half since BUFFY left the airwaves. Most teen dramas decided to be aspirational, about cool people with cool clothes and cool lives. Half of the characters on ONE TREE HILL were celebrities of some breed - singer, fashion designer, pro basketball player - and many of the others were leading successful lives. GOSSIP GIRL was set in a world of wealth and privilege that rarely explored real high school dynamics, and 90210 wasn't much different. You might make a case for PRETTY LITTLE LIARS dealing with some of this, but it was again a show about extremely pretty people with expensive clothes and a lot of relationship drama with other people. It seemed no one wanted a show about teenage pain, at least not on network TV.

Enter Netflix. Their first foray into modern high school drama was 13 REASONS WHY. I've written at length about that show in many other posts you can find on this site. Though the season 2 drama gets much more heightened, season one was one of the more realistic explorations of high school bullying, and all the emotional body blows that today's teens face. It's weird to realize my high school experience has more in common with the world of THE WONDER YEARS than that of 13 REASONS WHY, but concepts like cyber-bullying didn't even exist when I graduated 20 years ago. Some of what Hannah Baker faces is relatable to any high school graduate. There have always been people victimized by bad rumors and reputations that were forced on them. Certain sexual assault is nothing new even if our ways of raising awareness are different.

Teenage trauma was the core story of 13 REASONS WHY, so viewers were primed to expect that journey. What's more impressive is how a series that spent its first season on an 8-episode dick joke and then came back for season 2 with an equally prolonged poop joke turns out to be an even more incisive portrait of contemporary teens. AMERICAN VANDAL is many things. It's a brilliantly executed mockumentary that scores off of the modern hunger for true crime stories, it's an incredibly funny show that achieves laughs both base and intelligent, it's an amazing showcase for fresh-faced talent.

And it is the most serious look at the loneliness of adolescence.

If you haven't seen AMERICAN VANDAL's second season, I'll warn you that I'm about to spoil the ending.

In the final episode we learn that "The Turdburgler" is a previously-expelled student who catfished dozens of students and teachers at his school as part of a revenge plot. Not every student took the bait, but those who did believed they were in a relationship with the woman whom The Turdburgler presented themselves as, using stolen pictures and video. In doing so, he enticed many of them to send compromising pictures and videos, which were later used to blackmail four of them into participating in the four Turdburgler pranks.

To our shock, those four victims include not only prime suspect Kevin McClain, who is something of a performative weirdo and the kind of lonely person you'd expect to fall for it, but also Big Man on Campus DeMarcus Tillman, the basketball superstar who seemingly could be friends with anyone. It's a good lesson that even the popular kids feel like they're wearing a mask at school. Their popularity isn't always a cure for loneliness. Indeed, it can be isolating. Students want to be close to DeMarcus because he is the best... but he always has to wonder in the back of his mind... do they like him for him?

For DeMarcus to form what he believed was a genuine emotional bond with someone he never met speaks to both the loneliness he felt and he nature of online connection. My generation was just getting online around the time we started high school and college, but these kids have grown up in a world dominated by this sort of social media connectivity. Online life is real, particularly in an emotional sense.

DeMarcus couldn't find that intimate connection in person. It was only with the distance of talking to a stranger online that he felt he could show his "real self." With that vulnerability came the expectation the person he was talking to was being equally vulnerable.

Some of the catfish victims are persuaded to do truly humiliating things. When the truth comes out, some of their classmates are likely unsurprised because, yes the theater nerd and the strange "Fruit Ninja" are exactly the kind of people to be duped by an "online girlfriend." A lesser show would have left it at that, but it's AMERICAN VANDAL that finds the insight BUFFY did all those years ago. The creators recognize that some teenage trials are universal and that few teens recognize others' pain because they're focusing too much on their own.

This is why AMERICAN VANDAL resonates beyond being a silly diversion where a school is attacked with laxatives. It tries to reflect the truth of teenage life, knowing that audience identification and investment with the characters will run that much deeper. It's a show that gets under your skin by poking at the sides of themselves that the audience tries to hide.

Show your audience something in themselves they don't want anyone to see and I guarantee they'll follow you. In fact, they'll probably be unable to do anything else.

About Me

I've been reading scripts in Hollywood for over ten years. In that time I've read for Oscar-winning production companies, and one of the "Big Five" agencies, among others. I'm here to share what I've learned.... mostly because I'm sick of reading bad scripts.

I'm that guy you need to get past at the agencies and production companies; the first one in the office to read the script.